Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Matthew Simpson, a confidant of Lincoln and champion of the Union, ...comment[ed] during the war that, "If the world is to be raised to its proper place, I would say it with all reverence, God cannot do without America."
Violence has solved all kinds of issues, in fact the world is ruled by the controlled use of violence; it always has been and likely always will be.
The CS failed in a lot of things, but certainly not in the harnassing of that violence. Did quite well in fact... until the end of 63. The war started w/ the violence of the bombardment of Ft Sumter and ended with the CS surrender.
Lincoln was a complete human being w/ faults as glaring as anyone on this board... though history remembers him instead of Davis and there is no mystery as to why.
__________________ Shane Christen
American Legion Post 352
SUVCW Camp Abernethy# 48
Lifetime NRA member
3rd MN VI
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Eccl 1:18
Saying that 'God is on our side' is somehow a defense or argument that the South was right in its goals during the war and that the North was wrong?
Curious,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
If you believe God is on your side, he is, although he might want your side to lose. And, "It is God's will," has always irked me. How do you know?
Scriptures provide guidelines for personal accountability, not for group or government or nation. Abe had to answer only for his own actions when he left, as did Bobby Lee and Jeff Davis and Sherman and Grant, et al. You and I will be accountable for our own actions, if you believe that you will be held accountable.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
The Charleston Mercury:"Slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, whether white or black. Master and slave is a relation in society as necessary as that of parent and child, and the northern states will yet have to introduce it."
The New Orleans Delta:"Modern Free Society, as at present organized, is radically wrong and rotten. It is self-destroying and can never exist happily and normally until it is qualified by the introduction of some principle equivalent in effect to the institution of southern slavery."
The Muscogee {Alabama) Herald:"Free Society! We sicken of the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists?"
The Richmond Examiner:"Free Society is an impracticable form of society; it is everywhere starving, demoralizing, and insurrectionary. Two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, coexist and endure. The one must give way and cease to exist, the other become universal. If Free Society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to Slave Society--a social system old as the world, universal as man."
James M. Mason of Virginia (to the Senate of the United States): "It is now almost universally believed, in the South, that slavery is ennobling to both races, white and black. Free Society has failed; and that which is not free must be substituted."
Where is God in these statements?
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
I can’t let your post 2392 go by without congratulating you on its eloquence and good sense.
But on the larger issue I concur entirely with what Hal is saying. Religion, it seems to me, played a crucial part in shaping both abolitionism and the northern version of American patriotism.
Religion and abolitionism were inextricably connected. The tragedy was that Negro slavery was both an issue of abstract morality and a practical political problem. Progress could only be made if the question was approached pragmatically, as something to be subjected to the horse-trading and compromises which characterise the political process. Instead, active abolitionists thought and behaved like particularly narrow-minded “hellfire & brimstone” preachers:
Meanwhile, abolitionists reworked the definition of a Christian. Slaveholding became the cardinal sin in the antinomian theology, for men were judged solely according to their relationship to slavery, a radical departure in scriptural interpretation. Thereafter it was easy – all too easy – to distinguish the saints from the fallen. Non-slaveholding churchgoers could take refuge from their own spiritual vacuity by condemning others for what environment, circumstances, and inclination shielded them from ever doing…primitive woodcuts of lustful masters and abject slaves became the gargoyles and relics of a gothic revival. And there was even a kind of Protestant rite of indulgence performed in the purchase of a suitably decorated lamp-mat or a pamphlet from Knapp & Garrison. They were false representations, crude compositions for a complex and highly personal set of relationships in the South.
[Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints & Southern Sinners, pp.22-23.]
It was their religion, more than anything else, which blinded abolitionists to the fact that slaveholders were simply Americans, neither better nor worse than the average man, who found themselves in an invidious position.
Religion has also been intertwined with American patriotism in a way which is quite alien to the European mind. (If a British politician ended a speech with the words “God bless the United Kingdom” his career would end in the same instant. He would never recover from the public ridicule which would be heaped on him. It is entirely possible that his mental stability would be questioned.) It is true that Southerners believed in the same God as Northerners, a divinity who took an active interest in the affairs of nations and intervened to give victory to his favourites. But we must not lose sight of the central fact that the North aspired to conquer the South and remake it in its own image; whereas the South never aspired to do the same in reverse. And religion played an important part in shaping the mindset which told Northerners that they were entitled to do these things.
What happens when a nation steeped in religious puritanism embarks on a programme of imperial expansion? It has to justify its actions in religious terms, and so it invents the concept of Manifest Destiny. Destiny (which is a euphemism for God) decrees that the U.S. Government can steal land from Native Americans, Mexicans…Canadians too, given half a chance. And if God decrees it, it follows that opposition to this expansion is blasphemous.
Once you start thinking like this you can lose complete touch with reality. You can convince yourself that, as I have written before, your country is God’s “special project”. Remember Matthew Simpson’s words, as quoted by Hal? “God cannot do it without America.” This is not an expression of simple patriotism; it is an expression of a hubris which is – literally – insane.
Reading the words of many Northerners who wrote diaries and letters at the beginning of the war, it is clear that they had collectively crossed the line that divides rational patriotism from monumental conceit:
Secession in Northern eyes is still an unaccountable and inexplicable act of madness. The Union appears so natural, so liberal, and so good a government, that it is impossible that anybody who has lived beneath its rule should leave it willingly.
[Dicey, Spectator of America, p.296]
Rational patriotism consists of the belief that one’s country is largely a force for good and deserves to be protected. That is entirely different from the belief that one’s country is essentially perfect, has been designed by the Almighty Himself, and that the act of leaving it is wicked.
Bill
(Message edited by Bill_torrens on January 21, 2005)
Thank you for your kind words on my post #2392. Sometimes others on this board bring out bits of my soul, even when I am not truly aware of it.
When I was a young man of 18 and I enlisted in the Army, I was filled with my patriotic duty and the idea that I had been called by God to serve my country. Vietnam was in full swing at that time, but I saw no wrong in serving my country in that cause, that defending my country there was honorable and right, no question about it.
How do I feel about it now, more than a quarter century later? I am still a patriot and love my country, but I have grown up a bit. No matter how much God is proclaimed to be on 'our side,' I found out early in my military career, and hold the same opinion now, that no matter what the order or the cause, it would be ME that pulled the trigger that would take another human being's life. And I would have to live with that, justify that to myself for the rest of my days and finally answer to God for it.
BUT, as to the idea that somehow abolitionists and God fenzied causes for the war are all just a Norhtern manifestation, that conclusion is simply wrong, in my opinion. Calling upon God to justify the war from either side was pretty prevelent, including using God and the bible to justify slavery and the Southern way of doing things.
I am more of the opinion that most in the North were willing to let 'the erring sisters go' until they committed an unlawful act, the firing on Ft. Sumter. Then, and ONLY then, do you see a vast majority of the citizens of the North rise up and invoke the rightness of their cause, the preservation of the Union and the enforcement of the laws.
One could tell much from the letters of the soldiers home that they were fighting the war to preserve the Union, not a religious crudsade to free the slaves and punish the wicked, but more to defeat the treason of the South in rebellion. One may call on God to advance your cause, to protect one's self from harm, but I simply do not get the impression of a huge religious conspiricey of Republicans, abolitionists and clergy to crush the evil South.
I find it interesting that you mention Dicey's Spectator of America, as I have just started reading it. I also notice the quote you give from him does not mention God, abolition or the Republican party. I find it strange, Bill, that you would use a source that was mainly in favor of the North and its goals to support this line. But, truth is where you find it, isn't it?
Sincerely,
Unionblue
(Message edited by Unionblue on January 21, 2005)
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
It's my understanding that Northern churches had a great deal to do with the war effort and with the support of President Lincoln and the War Department, the U.S. Christian Commission was born. Lincoln recognized the value of religion as a stabilizing force in the Union army and on May 4, 1861, he ordered all regimental commanders to appoint Chaplains for their units. Jefferson Davis and his administration put less value on religious activities, but I'm sure that Stonewall Jackson (and General Lee) set the tone for substantial religious motivation/inspiration.
It's interesting to note that at the beginning of the war, Northern churches did not agree on the issue of slavery but most believed that it would die out on it's own. If the goal was to take whatever you want from others under the guise of "divine providence," then if the South had won and secceeded, this would have brought the North's forward march to a grinding halt, and that was definitely not in "God's plan." I don't believe that it was within the Republican government's scheme of things to look as a failure to the rest of the world; a leading nondenominational religious paper at the time stated that, "All is lost...we shall stand in history as the most beneficient or maleficent of human generations, and as the faithful or the most false in the eye of God."
President Lincoln declared several public fast days during the war and this only fuelled the belief of ministers that "the war was a baptism of blood." At the start of the war, the goal of these relgious leaders was to save the Union but after several army losses in Virginia, Northern ministers interpreted this as a direct punishment from God. It became popular opinion that God would not allow the North to win until it took steps to end slavery and this would only be achieved through further "pouring out of blood." Clergymen told their congregations that "loss and pain were good", and that "far more blood would not only be shed, it needed to be shed if the war were to attain it's God-appointed purpose."
I think the arrogance and religious zeal of the time can be summed up with these words from Albert T. Beveridge before the U.S. Senate: God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Tectonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish systems where chaos reigns. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples."
Bill, having survived two major snow storms this week and minus 40 temps, I now believe that my parka in exchange for your warm, dark ale is a very reasonable trade-off!
You have me speechless! Amazingly well-considered and -presented opinions. You make me feel small and shallow.
Actually, not. Religion played its role on both sides. Like a metasticising cancer it wriggled its roots into thought and feeling and, in some cases -- read, abolitionism -- did its bit to hasten the otherwise inevitable confrontation.
But we're whanging on a recently deceased equine. Cutting to the chase, the Union soldier signed up to kill Rebs because the Union needed saving. The Reb signed up to kill Yanks because they were agin ar rahts.
Each of them, in their holes, at night, turned his thoughts to whatever god he knew. And he asked for his life. Not for victory, not for the Union, not for States' Rights, for just one more day.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
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